I wished to set up a Fedora 23 notebook to pick up email via fetchmail. A problem I'd solved long ago on other distros and releases. fetchmail failed because it tried to use SMTP with localhost to do the local delivery and nobody was listening for SMTP. That got removed from the default install perhaps sometime around Fedora 20. So I installed postfix. That didn't work. I may have done some other things in desperation -- I was actually directing my user to do the sysadmining via intermittent email between different cities. This was a month ago so my memory is foggy. I picked up the problem yesterday, with direct access to the notebook. I'm not really familiar with the new way logging is handled (journald) so it took me a while to figure out that there was useful information there. (journalctl is a very awkward tool in my hands.) I finally figured out that I needed to "process" the aliases file (/etc/aliases). The comments in the file itself say to run the newaliases command. There was no such command. But there was newaliases.postfix. Running that didn't work: it tried to read something (what?) from standard in. I took a wild guess that the program looked at the name with which it was invoked behaved accordingly. So I created a symlink ~/bin/newaliases to /usr/bin/newaliases.postfix and invoked that. Success! Amusing fact: "man newaliases.postfix" displays a manpage (good!) that doesn't mention newaliases.postfix (bad!). Why was there no /usr/bin/newaliases? Perhaps in desperation I had gotten the user to install and remove different MTAs (sendmail, esmtp?) and the "preferences" system got lost. This seems unfortunate. (Although the preferences system is surely a Good Thing, it is something else I've not yet understood.) If postfix's /usr/bin/newaliases-and-whatever-else cares about the name under which it is invoked, it should log an error for an unexpected name. /usr/bin/newaliases.postfix has no other hard links on my system. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
